Friday, September 23, 2016

Depression affects women more than men. And yet, when men
become depressed they rarely seek treatment. So explains Elizabeth Bernstein in
her Bonds column this week.

Therapists are concerned about male depression, but not sufficiently
concerned to see that they might be more the problem than the solution.

After all, no self-respecting man is going to sit in a
therapist’s office and try to get in touch with his feelings. It will be worse
when the therapist is a woman. The experience is alien to his being. He will do
everything in his power to avoid debasing himself in front of a woman,
especially a woman therapist. Moreover he will suspect, correctly, that a woman will not understand the extent to which his self-regard depends on his career success.

Most of today’s therapists are female. And they are more
likely to want a man to get in touch with his feminine side, to get in touch
with his feelings, to express what he is bottling up inside. It’s what they
know how to do. About the world of men they know very little.

Worse yet, in many cases today’s therapists are indoctrinating
people in politically correct pieties. Today’s female therapists are invariably
feminists and they use their practice to pass along the feminist party line. They
will tell men to support their wives’ careers and to diminish their commitments to their careers in order to have work/life
balance.

Again, it’s what they know. And it’s what they believe.

When men become depressed the reason most often has to do
with being less successful in their careers. Not always, but very often. If
they bought the notion of work/life balance and have cut back their hours on the job they will most likely fall behind their colleagues who have not
done the same. This loss of status, this sense of being second rate cannot be
solved with a pill and cannot be solved by getting in touch with anyone’s
feelings.

To be fair they might have been persuaded to do as Mark
Zuckerberg did, to take time off to play Mr. Mom with their newborn. Their wives might have told them: If Mark Zuckerberg can do it, why can't you? They did
not understand that Zuckerberg was pulling an arrogant stunt, and that if
a man who is not worth billions and does not own the company does as Zuckerberg did, his career prospects will decline precipitously.

Of course, men today are subjected to constant male and
husband bashing. They are guilt-tripped about being part of the patriarchy. If they are white they are trashed for their white privilege. If they are Asian they are still trashed for their white privilege. They are taken to be potential or actual rapists. They are disrespected and
insulted with impunity. If they dare to fight back they are threatened.

Given the cultural climate and given male instinct they are
disinclined to see a female therapist.

More than a few men have seen their career success
systematically undermined by their wives. And yet, they cannot leave their
marriages because they want what is best for their children. They feel trapped
and helpless.

If a depressed man goes to see a feminist therapist she will
most likely tell him to man up and do the dishes. She will tell him that he
needs to get over his patriarchal longings and his white privilege. Then she
will tell him that he has control issues and unresolved pathological
narcissism.

So, why would he want to go to see such a therapist? Someone who is doling out the party line and pretending that it is science.

Back in the day when women were becoming more prominent in
the therapy world they were trolling for female clients. They used to say that
no man could ever understand a woman’s experience. No man could feel the proper
amount of empathy for a woman… as though such empathy and introspective
soul-searching would ever help a woman to get along in the world.

Obviously enough, their argument must also entail that most
women do not really understand a man’s experience. Given their predilection to believe
that feminist pieties are scientific fact, many female therapists are not
going to understand men at any time in the near future.

Besides, keep in mind that most depression today is treated
with medication. We can argue about whether the medication is effective, but if
talk therapy were really an effective treatment of depression, the nation would
not be awash in Prozac.

One understands that therapists are licensed and
credentialed professionals, but if you think that it’s easy to treat depression
or, for example, addiction, you should think again.

One needs to mention, if only as a public service, that men
who are suffering from depression would do better to get a trainer than to get
a therapist. Better to get a trainer who conditions them than to find a
therapist who will tell them to get in touch with their feelings. By now,
everyone knows that exercise is a great treatment for depression, but one needs
to keep mentioning it.

Also, when it comes to treatment, keep in mind the immortal words of Harvard
psychiatrist, Dr. Richard Mollica: “The best anti-depressant is a job.” Not
just a job of course, but a job in which one is succeeding. If a man
compromises his job prospects to find work/life balance, and thus sees others
doing better than he, he will have lost face. And lost face is a form of
depression.

Work/life balance is becoming the epitaph on the
tombstones of many a man’s dead career.

I emphasize again: being in touch with your feelings has
very little to do with learning how to function in the world. And no therapist
can help a patient learn how to function in the world if the therapist does not
know how the world functions.

Most therapists whine about emotion because that’s what they
know. It’s their domain. The world of business, commerce and the professions…
is not their bailiwick. Instead of trying to make sense out of a difficult work situation
or a complex marital negotiation, they are likely to fall back on the idiot
question: How does that make you feel?

I promise you, no man has any idea of what that means. If he answers the question he will only be going through the motions.

When therapists get over their mania about feelings they
tell their patients that it’s all a control issue. But, what good does that do?
Either you can help a patient get control of his life or you cannot. Saying
that he has control issues is mindless pabulum.

As it happens, Bernstein uses male therapists in her column.
A wise choice, indeed. And yet, the male therapists seem more to be
metrosexual. They want you to learn how to express your emotions.

Shouldn’t they know that a man who expresses his emotions
openly and freely will lose the respect of his colleagues, his manager and his staff.
Most men will think that they are not only being invited to learn how better to
whine, and they know that if they go to therapy and develop the bad habit of
expressing their emotions, the habit will not remain contained within the walls
of the therapist’s office.

So-called experts affirm this assessment. Bernstein
explains:

Some
men aren’t in touch with their feelings. But the larger problem is that men
have been conditioned not to talk about them. “There is that sense that they
should be in control of their emotions and that being depressed can be viewed
as a sign of weakness,” says Jeffrey Borenstein, a psychiatrist and
president of the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation in New York. Men are
expected to handle problems on their own, he says.

Actually, it’s not such a bad idea for women to learn how to
handle problems. If women and men are taught by therapists to get in touch with
their feelings they will be avoiding their problems in favor of soul searching
and navel-gazing.

For a man, this emotion centered therapy will feel like an
invitation to weakness. They know that it will make them feel more depressed
and more ineffectual:

This
sense of weakness can make depression worse for men, therapists say. “For women,
depression is a signal for getting help, that something needs to be addressed
in a fundamental way,” says Nando Pelusi, a clinical psychologist in
New York. “For men, it’s a signal that they are a failure and are submitting to
defeat.”

As it happens, these insight-oriented therapies are largely a
waste of time. Bernstein points out that the most effective treatments for
depression are based on cognitive exercises or on changing behavior:

There
are several types of psychotherapy that have been shown to successfully treat
depression and that focus on changing one’s behavior. These include Cognitive
Behavioral Therapy, which helps a person change his thoughts, and Behavioral
Activation, which helps him become more engaged in his day-to-day life. These
may be more comfortable to many men.

Of course, it’s not really about making this more
comfortable for men. It is about getting men more engaged in their jobs and
their careers. And yet, in order to help a man to do this one must have a good
sense of how the world works, how a business is organized, what demands and
requirements are involved.

How many therapists really know much of anything about any
of this? Precious few, I believe. The men who refuse to submit themselves to a
therapy that will tell them to get in touch with their feelings, that will tell
them to express their feelings, that will tell them to accept a reasonable
work/life balance, that will tell them to get in touch with their feminine
sides, that will disrespect their drive to get ahead in the world and will
demean their manliness… are doing the best that they can under the
circumstances.

When I was young I spent years in therapy for "depression" until finally I learnt how to get less in touch with my feelings. In fact I learnt to ignore my feelings altogether. This is something I recommend to everyone.

Wow, the contempt for feelings is so vast here, you'd almost think contempt wasn't a feeling, or is it an emotion?

Its easy enough to accept men and women may experience depression differently, although a good scientist would perhaps try to identify different aspects of depression and find in any measure, there's likely a bell curve of responses in men and women.

Like autonomy, men likely value autonomy or control more than women, and the less control you feel in your life, the more depressed you might be, and men might feel this more than women at times. At least you could say one opposite of autonomy is connection, and women might feel more depressed if they don't feel connected, and they may not mind feeling a little controlled, (as in "love honor and obey"), if it protects their sense of connection.

On the other side, because men value autonomy higher, they will strive for this their whole lives, and push people away who seem to be trying to control them, and in the later years find themselves isolated and depressed, and not recognize the need for connection as valid, and many such men end up committing suicide in later life, as the successful suicide rates show.

You can look at male and female sucide rates on a map and it is stark. The women's map is almost all light blue, <10 suicides/100k, while the men's map pretty much starts at 10 suicides/100k on up, and the sparse western states seem to collect the loneliest cowboys with rates of 25-40 suicides/100k.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Suicide_by_region,_white_men.pnghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Suicide_by_region,_white_women.png

So if the choice is getting in touch with one's feelings is a path that allows recognition of a failure of connection with the people around him, it seems a small price to pay over the despair of suicide.

And measures of suicide are probably yet a small measure of male depression, and you could look at alcoholism or other death-by-sitting-in-front-of-the-tv-in-a-stupor as well.

Of course we can tell the alcoholics to get a personal trainer, and get their falling testosterone flowing again, and that'll do some good, if they listen. But if physical fitness just keeps an isolated man in his isolation, then some part of him will surely stop caring about exercise that doesn't help meet his need for connection.

Interestingly, it looks like male politicians have a recognition that autonomy isn't the end-all-be-all of masculinity, and they will choose connection sometimes, after months of prayer and soul searching, like Cruz just endorsed Trump for president, and Trump, despite his saying he wouldn't accept an endorsement from Cruz also changed his mind.http://www.mprnews.org/story/2016/09/23/npr-after-bitter-primary-fight-ted-cruz-to-back-donald-trump

So unity against women (or a specific woman) is enough to get powerful men to swallow their pride and work together against a common enemy. Once a man has a goal, depression can be delayed, at least until November 9th.

So if the choice is getting in touch with one's feelings is a path that allows recognition of a failure of connection with the people around him, it seems a small price to pay over the despair of suicide.

For men getting in touch with one's feelings is a path that leads to despair and suicide.

One reason women are less likely to kill themselves is that women never feel regret or remorse. That's because women are never wrong. If you doubt that, just ask any woman. If feelings are everything you can't ever have done anything wrong because how can feelings be wrong?

Men make moral judgments and admit the possibility of error. Women make emotional judgments and do not admit the possibility of error.

dfordoom said... One reason women are less likely to kill themselves is that women never feel regret or remorse.

So what you're saying is men are capable of feelings of remorseful because of conscience, while women avoid feelings of remorse because they have no conscience, or a flawed conscience, so fail to consider that the perspective or feelings of men matter.

So we have collectively solved that problem by accepting hurt feelings of men don't matter, and women are right to believe this, consciously or unconsciously. And trouble-making therapists are foolishly trying to upset this ancient truce. (Or is the opposite true, men try to pretend women's feelings don't matter, until their therapist tries to convince them otherwise?)

In any case, a danger with unacceptable feelings (the kind that PC police disapprove of) is when rationalizations get hardened into rigid assumptions, reinforced by only seeing what fits the pattern, and whose generalized conclusions are beyond question, and that are required to contain all true. I'd imagine both genders do this equally.

Myself, I'll agree feelings and moods are subjective and contradictory and every changing, so not dependable sources of knowledge, and when shared, can be used against you later. So if I choose not to share mine with you, it may be because it is not in my best interest to do so. And if I do share, it will not be while I'm experiencing them, but much later after careful examination and a provisional integration with the needs of the people around me. At least that would be the ideal.

So what you're saying is men are capable of feelings of remorseful because of conscience, while women avoid feelings of remorse because they have no conscience, or a flawed conscience, so fail to consider that the perspective or feelings of men matter.

I think that women fail to consider the perspective or feelings of other women as well. No-one is as merciless towards a woman as another woman. Other women are regarded as rivals (in their emotional lives) or obstacles (in their careers).

Feminism has of course made things worse by reassuring women that being selfish and wallowing in emotions is A-OK but the problem seems to be inherent.

There are doubtless sound evolutionary reasons for these profound differences between men and women.